I just wasted six hours of my life wrestling with our development tools at work and things still don't work. I swear I remember one of my co-workers telling me that new tools would solve all of our problems and maybe even cancer. Perhaps he was stretching the truth a wee bit.
Tonight I'm taking a tour of the Winchester Mystery House by flashlight. Fear not, I'll let both of my faithful readers know how it went.
Perhaps to redress my prior complaints, Zeldman has redesigned Jeffrey Zeldman Presents. Actually, I'm pretty sure that my rants didn't influence the new design in the slightest. How do I know for sure? Well, not only do links to external sites still open in a new browser window (and the same one at that), but the turquoise-on-green (!) text is positively microscopic. Sigh.
Last night I caught a showing of the Marx brothers' Animal Crackers at the Stanford Theatre. As always, it's a good thing I wasn't drinking milk or it probably would have shot out my nose due to laughter. The audience at the Stanford is always very thoughtful and we applauded Chico and Harpo's musical turns as well as groaned at several of Groucho's atrocious puns. The print was rather uneven, especially the soundtrack, but I'm glad to have seen it on the big screen at all.
After the movie, I stopped by Kepler's and bought a copy of the first volume of Karl Marx's Capital. Guy has been reading it recently and I wanted to have a copy on hand just in case. Some colleagues and I also had a very interesting discussion on Marxism at lunch, trying to separate Marx's economic and political theories; we're all staunch capitalists but enjoy a good argument every now and then. As we armchair economists see it, Marxism has a massive bootstrap problem and even if it were successfully implemented is likely to suffer from the "bad apple" problem.
To cap off my lovely Marxist weekend, tonight I'll be returning to the Stanford for Duck Soup.
... there I am with my brand new mobile phone ringtone. My service provider is more than willing to sell me crappy ringtones, but it's much more fun to make your own. Find a MIDI file (I chose the theme from Wallace and Gromit for this experiment), convert it to format 0, upload it to an HTTP server, create a redirect file, load the redirect file in your phone's web browser, and bam! you can use that tune as your ringer. It's so easy a hyperintelligent child could do it.
Paul, my musical fact-checker, rightly informs me that "Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard" was in fact recorded by Paul Simon sans Art Garfunkel's assistance, contrary to the claims of a certain previous entry. I'm slipping, I know, but I will additionally point out that "Me and Julio" was recorded in 1972 and Simon and Garfunkel released their last single together ("My Little Town") in 1975, not counting the odd collaboration, compilation, or concert.
Jonathan Hoefler (yes, that Jonathan Hoefler) apparently wrote a cool piece for issue 42 of Emigre magazine called "On Classifying Type" that I missed completely. Shame about the Flash, though.
I called Sprint PCS just now to ask about an error I've been getting on my new mobile phone (about which more later), only to be told that I couldn't be helped with phone errors while I was calling from the mobile phone itself. Hold time: 20 minutes. I called again from a landline, only to be told that the error was a network error and that my phone was fine. Hold time: another 20 minutes. Sprint PCS sucks.
I've also used some recently-gained CSS knowledge to reformat this site slightly. As you may have noticed if you are not blind, I moved the sidebar to the right, à la ALA. More dorkage to come, I'm sure.
The GameCube network adapter is scheduled to be released tomorrow. Considering that the PlayStation 2 owns the market and its network adapter only cost me $40, Nintendo has an uphill climb ahead of it. Not to mention the fact that there have been scant few games announced for it (NBA2K3, NFL2K3, and PSO2), but Nintendo is one of the savviest players in the gaming marketing and may very well have an ace up its sleeve. Time will tell.
I'm pleased to say that this site has gone from being invisible on the Hiptop to merely illegible, a definite improvement.
We just finished watching Osamu Tezuka's Metropolis. It's a timeless tale, really: boy meets girl, boy falls in love with girl, girl turns out to be a robot built in secret by a mad scientist acting on the orders of the leader of a semi-secret cult whose goal is to take over the world by means of a giant radiation source that somehow only affects robots and not humans and also happens to contain a giant mechanized throne with which the robot girl interfaces and eventually goes mad and attempts to kill the boy and nearly succeeds but is thwarted by the cultist's tenacious ward who has been trying to destroy the robot girl all along to protect the cultist but ends up destroying the girl and the giant radiation source along with the cultist and a horde of robot attackers. Oh, and there's a bit of man vs. nature symbolism, too.
I can't really recommend this bizarre movie, although the animation has its moments and soundtrack is impressively goofy. If you do see it, be sure to keep your ears peeled for a sound effect that sounds exactly like the Millennium Falcon breaking down (several scenes were cribbed wholesale from the original Star Wars trilogy, too, but as jaded moviegoers we're used to that by now, right?).
Jeffrey Zeldman Presents, while an interesting read, pisses me off to no end. Zeldman insists on encumbering links to external sites with a "target" attribute so as to force them to open in a new window. I don't mean to couch my complaints in the form of a personal attack, but I find this particular linking tactic to be both annoying and egotistical on several counts: first, it completely defeats the purpose of my browser's back function; second, it discourages me from clicking on more than one external link on Zeldman's site (since every link is sent to the same window); and third, it implies that Zeldman's site is inherently more important than the sites to which it links. Grumble, grumble...
On my way to Lana and Sonya's to meet up with Soren and eat yummy borscht this evening, I listened to the Royal Tenenbaums soundtrack, which I found in my car's CD changer. It's actually the second copy of the album I bought; this fact both pleases and infuriates me. I originally bought this album in December 2001 due to my fascination with the movie and my innumerable hours of enjoyment of the Rushmore soundtrack (also highly recommended). Plenty of good stuff on it, but several key songs were missing from it. A "remastered" version of the album was then released July 2002 with several omitted songs added, notably Simon and Garfunkel's "Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard" and the Mutato Muzika Orchestra's enchanting arrangement of "Hey Jude." A number of songs that appeared in the movie are still missing, notably the Rolling Stones' "She Smiled Sweetly" and "Ruby Tuesday" (due to the Stones' refusal to license their catalog for soundtracks), Van Morrison's "Everyone," and John Lennon's "Look At Me," among others. Personally, I'm fine with the album in its remastered state now that it has "Hey Jude" since all of the other recordings are available elsewhere, but consider this a word of warning if you're planning on purchasing this still-enjoyable recording.
I've tweaked the template for this page to no longer use absolute positioning so hopefully Alex can read it on his Hiptop now. On second thought, I don't know who's the bigger dork, me or him.
It's old favorites day here at the ranch and after some Duran Duran I'm currently listening to tunes by Nickel Creek. After the release of This Side I called sophomore slump on the gang, but I thought perhaps I should give them a re-listening after some time off to see if I had been unduly harsh. The verdict: This Side has some decent tracks but still doesn't even come close to surpassing the group's debut release in terms of inventiveness and sheer virtuousity from this young trio. Pretty much all the halfway decent songs are the ones written by the performers themselves but that only accounts for seven of the twelve tracks (I'm counting two halves in that number). The only possible exception is "I Should've Known Better," but that's only because it sounds awesome with its explosive percussion and slap bass line when turned up loud on a good pair of speakers.
Nickel Creek remains an incredible album, one of my favorites, and not just because it was written and recorded by a three awesome musicians even younger than I am. The followup album feels too crossover to me, which wouldn't be bad if it highlighted the Watkins siblings, Sean and Sara, and Chris Thile's fabulous instrumental talents more. Both albums are immaculately produced by Alison Krauss.
Chris Thile's solo effort Not All Who Wander Are Lost is also worthy of praise. Featuring such luminaries as Béla Fleck and MacArthur fellow Edgar Meyer, it's a spirited and virtuostic romp, even if some of the songs are musically underdeveloped.
For absolutely no purpose whatsoever (nearly), I bought a Palm Zire today. It has no backlight, no dock connector, no expansion port, no wireless, and practically no memory. It also may very well be the best Palm I've ever owned. Its battery is supposed to last about a month, it trickle charges via its micro USB connector (the same type that my camera has), and it plays Klondike like a champ, which is good considering that that was my sole raison de l'acheter.
Most reviewers are making hay of the fact that the Zire is severely stripped down and claim that its simplicity will appeal to many of its purchasers. I agree, but with a slight modification: what's appealing about the Zire is not that it's simple to use, but that it's simple to buy. Surveying the PDA landscape is not a task for the faint of heart. There are devices Palm, Sony, Handspring, HandEra, and Samsung, and that's just for Palm OS devices. Screw all that, says the frustrated consumer, just make it cheap and simple. The result is the Zire: the timeless Palm OS interface, a simple cable, and a sturdy if plasticky case. This may just be the PDA that saves Palm.
Note to self: staying up until 3:00 AM is probably not the best idea when you have a 9:00 AM meeting. I made to the meeting, but who schedules meetings for 9:00 AM anyway? I mean, honestly!
There aren't many big-label rockers left, but Tom Petty sure doesn't seem to mind: The Last DJ is rollicking good fun. On paper Petty's latest album doesn't look like it's doing too well in the standings: it's not the best pop rock I've heard lately (that would be Coldplay's A Rush of Blood to the Head) and even his disenfranchisement looks forced next to Aimee Mann's (who started her own label to put out Lost In Space), but who cares? From the ultra-compressed opening riff of the title track to the Talking Heads feel of "When a Kid Goes Bad" to the ukelele-strumming "Man Who Loves Women", it's one hell of a ride. God bless rock and roll.
Now about this Steel Battalion controller. After first learning of it, I wanted to see it. I have little desire to play the game, nor do I even own an Xbox, but for whatever reason, vast and unknowable, I had to see it. Lamentably, I was unable to loose even the tiniest datum on the subject from the Internet's vast store of knowledge. I even went so far as to indirectly contact a FOAF who works in the same building as the Xbox team, and not even he had seen this contraption. Curses!
Fortunately, my dearest friend Lilly possesses such exquisite ontological skills that with the merest brushing of her fingertips upon a keyboard she was able to conjure up such fantastical images that tears welled up in my eyes and fell as if a gentle rain.
Update: IGN is lame. I can't link to their page, so you'll have to type the URL into your location bar by hand: <http://xbox.ign.com/articles/362/362157p1.html>. Jerk-butts.
Update: Alex points out that you can also see the controller here, albeit only as part of a larger image.
If you can supply me with a picture of the controller that comes with Steel Battalion for the Xbox, you will be my new best friend. Thanks in advance.
Found on Penny Arcade: the anti-telemarketing EGBG counterscript.
Ever since hearing a live performance of it this spring, I've been looking for a good recording of the sinfonia from J. S. Bach's Cantata 146, Wir müssen durch viel Trübsal in das Reich Gottes eingehen. Most of the recordings I found were only available as part of a set or portion thereof, like Harnoncourt's recording. About a month ago I did manage to find a relatively obscure recording by Joan Lippincott and the Princeton University Chapel Camerata that gets the tempo and excitement of this fun piece just right.
Unfortunately, the recording is pretty average and completely lacking in bass, so the piece comes out sounding flat and one-dimensional, which it most definitely is not. Liner note: "The opening Allegro, an ambitious ritornello form of 190 measures, displays extensive solo episodes for the organ including violin figures (double-stop and bariolage passages) that do not fall easily under finger." And how! At the live performance I attended I was sitting maybe four feet behind the organist with a full view of the console (and pedals). The organist himself was totally rocking out, appropriately enough.
In skimming the 21 October 2002 issue of Newsweek over coffee this morning, I came across a rather disingenuous article about CD bootleggers. "Napster may be dead, but bootlegging is thriving" reads the subtitle, and like many pieces on the subject it's depressingly one-sided. The article goes on and on about how easy it is to make counterfeit CDs and the steps various artists are taking to combat said counterfeiting (Dre, for instance, has a healthy dose of paranoia).
What's missing from the article, however, is any explanation of why consumers buy these counterfeits. Curtis Harris, the article's author, mentions one possible reason only obliquely when he writes "The Recording Industry Association of America estimates that record companies lose more than $300 million a year to the streets, where knockoff CDs can go for $2.50." Well, boo hoo for the poor record companies. Has no one told Harris that Sam Goody is selling new releases for $20 these days? Good luck getting more than one or two good singles off one of said releases, too. It's pretty obvious why Best Buy typically makes a killing off CDs during the opening weeks of a new store location: they sell new releases for $10-$12 apiece.
I'm not that I'm complaining about the article because I think CDs are too expensive. Heck, the sum of my yearly CD purchases probably exceeds the GDP of some island nations. I'm complaining about the article because it only relates one side of the issue. And after a number of editorials in which Steven Levy lambasted both the RIAA and the MPAA for their dirty pool, I'm surprised to see an article like this in Newsweek at all.
In a previous entry I mistakenly asserted that Janet Jackson's "All For You" sampled Quincy Jones when it fact it was Change's "Glow of Love." Thanks to Paul for setting me straight. I had gotten my facts confused because it was Janet's other producer(s) who had done the original song: that is, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, not Jones. Won't happen again, I promise.
I'm listening to The Richest Man In Babylon by Thievery Corporation right now; Wired recently ran an interview with the creative pair behind the Corporation. While I think it's unfair to imply that other artists don't follow a similar creative process these days (videlicet the prevalence of cut-and-paste editing), Babylon still has some catchy tunes. Not only that, but Steve loaned me a Thievery Corporation sampler which includes such goodies as a remix of Nicola Conte's most excellent "Bossa Per Due" so I'm all set to groove.
I managed to hit the corner light just right on my way to work this morning, but I unfortunately left my copy of Tricycle by Flim & the BB's at home. Perhaps this is just the gods' way of telling me to buy the new SACD remastering of it. I must appease the gods, but in the meantime I'm putting "Wildflowers" on the sound system (off Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers' excellent album of the same name).
I wanted to take break from Q to recollect a recent thought. I was thinking about Frequency (of all things) and decided that while the game itself is trés cool, its sound engine is pretty run of the mill. If your timing is a bit off, especially while completing a vocal track, you can hear the samples being spliced together. This in turn reminded me of an article I glanced at in a recent issue of Game Developer's Journal about "reactive" audio engines that are able to vary various attributes of a game's soundtrack in response to the player's actions. The cover of course had some tagline like "Learn how to incorporate the latest reactive audio technologies into your game," a tagline which successfully piqued my interest. I flipped to the article and directly found a section describing several video games' use of an amazing new reactive audio technology: MOD.
Uh... what? Talk about stepping into a time machine back to my childhood when SoundTrecker was the latest thing. Haven't we progressed beyond MOD since then? Consider the fabulous SSX Tricky, which has an audio engine that is way better than it deserves. I don't mean to demean Tricky in the least since it is perhaps one of my most favorite games ever, I'm just trying to note how frickin' awesome it is when it comes to audio. Not only does it have continuous mixes of perhaps two dozen songs, but it can vary the song's tempo and section, in addition to being able to overlay the "tricky" theme when your trick meter is full. The section variations in particular are impressively subtle: if you 'board off the main course, the music will segue to a mellower downtempo section. Return to the path more traveled by and the main theme will return.
Next thing you know GDJ will be publishing articles about tricks for displaying more simultaneous sprites.
Alcazar's Casino is currently in my CD player, by way of Sweden (music), Germany (pressing), and the UK (export). "Crying At the Discoteque" is the single that swept the European dance scene (or so I'm told) and the entire album takes me back to a decade for which I was barely even alive. Conoisseurs of the Jackson family's musical oeuvre will note that Alcazar's "Paris In the Rain" uses the same Quincy Jones sample as the title track on Janet's All For You.
Next up: Steve just loaned me his copy of The Clash's eponymously named album, plus I should probably get around to my as-of-yet unopened copies of ATB's Movin' Melodies and Adam Freeland's Tectonics, but The New Yorker's 14-21 October 2002 issue has a review of Beck's Sea Change and I might end up listening to some more of that after reading about it.
My mother notes that the latest Kinsey Millhone mystery, Q Is for Quarry, is out today. Clues left in envelopes taped to the bottom of park benches by my shadowy underworld associates suggest I will be spending my evening curled up with a good book.
I forgot to link to Lilly's Peter Gabriel log entry.
Plus, I owe my mother a cookie. Hi, Mom!
A couple weeks ago I purchased Peter Gabriel's latest album, Up. While I'm a huge fan of Gabriel's work, I have the sneaking suspicion that Up is nothing more than ear candy, plain and simple.
Don't get me wrong, I think this is a great recording. "Signal to Noise" and "I Grieve", the latter appearing in a form improved over its previous appearance on the City of Angels soundtrack, have such fantastic buildings-up that I always crank them up early on and then four minutes later discover that I probably should be more careful about my hearing but what the heck, rocking out. Nearly every song is awash with texture and even the distortion of "Darkness" is visceral musical release. The recording is superlative also: listen carefully on "The Drop" to hear the damper action on Gabriel's Bösendorfer and pine with me for an SACD release. Critics have noted this album for being darker and moodier than Gabriel's previous albums, but I don't consider this worthy of fault. Up is a fascinating musical retreat from the world. But...
The one thing missing from Up is originality. Peter Gabriel has long been master of the hook (perhaps even longer than the term itself has been popular) and he's back in force with this album. "More Than This" is my favorite, with a a catchy opening and a grooving bass riff. But haven't I heard this song before? For that matter, haven't I heard this entire album before? I'm not saying this album rips off anyone other than Gabriel himself, but so much of it is so prototypical that I can't help being somewhat depressed over what seems like missed opportunities. "Signal to Noise" is a great example of this: if Eddie Vedder showed how to use the voice of Qaw'wali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan to such quiet, forceful effect in Dead Man Walking, why couldn't Gabriel link Khan's soaring melodies to words more powerful than these ("All the while the world is turning to noise / Oh, the more that it's surrounding us, the more that it destroys / Turn up the signal, wipe out the noise")? At least the drumming of the Dhol Foundation is able to save this song from its maudlin self, but what could save "The Barry Williams Show" from such an inane topic as daytime talk shows? In general, methinks the similies are a bit too obvious, the lamentations a bit too forced. It's a shame, too, because this music deserves more.
We're at Lana and Sonya's place watching Ghost In the Shell right now, and I'm reminded by the soundtrack that drums are cool. When I was in college I took a music course that was ostensibly about oral tradition musicianship, but was actually just a chance to spend a term learning how to play the djembe and other percussion instruments.
Lately I've been hooked on the intense game Frequency for PS2. I'm beginning to realize part of its hook is that even though most of the musical lines one plays in the game are melodic, the input scheme is completely percussive. Now all I have to do is find some more friends with PS2 broadband adapters and Frequency. Even better would be catching the Duke of Belgian Waffles online, but I haven't even unlocked the Expert version of "Science Genius Girl" yet.
I'd like to start by apologizing to my numerous (hah!) readers: I had hoped to set up this blog 3 days ago to commemorate something very special to me that happened on 10 October 2001, but obviously I missed my self-imposed deadline. Mea culpa and all that jazz.
A cookie to the first person who can tell me what the very special thing was.